"The only kind of writing is rewriting." - Ernest Hemingway
"The best writing is rewriting." - E.B. White
"Good writing is rewriting." - Truman Capote

As our most admired authors note, the process of writing is far more about rewriting a work's first, second, and sometimes more drafts. Yet so many people—professional and amateurs—fail to heed their advice, submitting research papers, fiction and non-fiction stories, journal articles, and class essays without rereading much less rewriting. Why?

Perhaps it is the egoism of "I know how to write," ignorance of the real work of writing, or simple laziness. Whatever the excuse, the number of research papers accepted by respected journals that would not pass muster in a middle school English class is frightening. One can only imagine how many are rejected and/or retracted based upon their unreadableness. Even when rewriting to fix grammatical errors, misspellings, poor syntax, common typos, ill presented arguments, structural defects and more would alleviate the problem.

An Example

This abstract is from a journal-retracted paper which should never have reached publication.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) intent is to facilitate human limits. It is getting a standpoint on human administrations, filled by the growing availability of restorative clinical data and quick progression of insightful strategies. Motivated by the need to highlight the need for employing AI in battling the COVID-19 Crisis, this survey summarizes the current state of AI applications in clinical administrations while battling COVID-19. Furthermore, we highlight the application of Big Data while understanding this virus. We also overview various intelligence techniques and methods that can be applied to various types of medical information-based pandemic. We classify the existing AI techniques in clinical data analysis, including neural systems, classical SVM, and edge significant learning. Also, an emphasis has been made on regions that utilize AI-oriented cloud computing in combating various similar viruses to COVID-19. This survey study is an attempt to benefit medical practitioners and medical researchers in overpowering their faced difficulties while handling COVID-19 big data. The investigated techniques put forth advances in medical data analysis with an exactness of up to 90%. We further end up with a detailed discussion about how AI implementation can be a huge advantage in combating various similar viruses. – (The journal's name, paper title and authors are not cited to prevent embarrassment).

Countless teachers tell students to write papers before the last minute, put them away and reread them with fresh eyes after a few days. Those students—and any writer—will discover all types of correctable problems. In fact, good teachers will tell you to let someone you trust, someone who has no preconception of what you wrote to read your paper and respond with notes on errors, places where the writing is unintelligible and suggestions for improvement. But so very few take this advice seriously; a situation particularly humiliating for Ph.D.-certified scholars who should know better!

As a professor, I went as far as letting students turn papers in a week early so I could read and comment on them in advance. Essentially, I volunteered to be their editor. (Using an editor is not cheating – it a very smart move!). In nearly 30 years, maybe five students took me up on the offer. Now, in retirement, I work as freelance editor with clients in a variety of fields to refine and improve their research papers, prepublication articles, application essays, and statements, presentations, speeches, dissertation defenses, and more.

An Improved Abstract

This is my post-edit version of the poorly written abstract you read above:

Though available clinical data about and insightful strategies for dealing with the COVID-19 crisis continue to grow, Artificial Intelligence (AI) intent can accelerate discoveries by enhancing human research. This survey summarizes the current state of AI applications used by clinicians battling COVID-19. We highlight the use of Big Data, provide an overview of AI methodology, and classify existing AI techniques as applicable to understanding and analyzing medical data and the virus itself. Additionally, we discuss past use of AI-oriented cloud computing, sector vector machines (SVM), neural networks and their analysis of viruses like COVID-19. This survey study will benefit medical practitioners and researchers facing difficulties while handling COVID-19 data. Among our findings are that AI significantly increases the exactness of data analysis and that AI use will be a huge advantage as future researchers combat similar viruses.

Though I hope that you will contact me to edit your next manuscript, please, at least, take to heart the words of Hemingway, White, and Capote—rewrite your drafts!